Black Culture Is Not the Problem

By N. D. B. Connolly

May 1, 2015

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Baltimore on Wednesday.CreditCreditShannon Stapleton/Reuters

BALTIMORE — IN the wake of the Michael Brown shooting and subsequent unrest in Ferguson, Mo., commentators noted the absence of black representatives among Ferguson’s elected officials and its police leadership. A Department of Justice report highlighted how Ferguson’s mostly white City Council and its courts spurred on explicitly racist policing, in part to harvest fines from black residents.

Then came Baltimore. The death of Freddie Gray, like those of Eric Garner, John Crawford III, Rekia Boyd and so many other unarmed African-Americans, at first seemed to fit the all-too-familiar template — white cops, black suspect, black corpse.

But unlike New York, Chicago and other cities with white leaders, Baltimore has a black mayor, a black police commissioner and a majority-black City Council. Yet the city still has one of the most stained records of police brutality in recent years.

In the absence of a perceptible “white power structure,” the discussion around Baltimore has quickly turned to one about the failings of black culture. This confuses even those who sympathize with black hardship. When people took to the streets and destroyed property, most observers did not see an understandable social response to apparent state inaction. They saw, in the words of Baltimore’s mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, “thugs,” or in the words of President Obama, “criminals and thugs.”

To be fair, the mayor later expressed regret, and both she and the president have tried to show empathy for the dispossessed. But they are also fighting myths about degenerate black culture. Condemning “criminals” and “thugs” seems to get them away from beliefs about broad black inferiority.

Yet when black people of influence make these arguments, it prevents us from questioning Baltimore the way we questioned Ferguson.

Instead, we lionize people like Toya Graham, the Baltimore mother who went upside the head of her rioting son. Baltimore’s police commissioner, Anthony W. Batts, applauded her, pleading with parents to “take control of your kids.” But the footage certainly affirms violence as the best way to get wayward black people under control.

Moreover, by treating a moment of black-on-black violence as a bright spot, we take our eye off the circumstances that created the event. We forget, for instance, about how officials, in their fear of black youth, issued what witnesses said was a pre-emptive riot-police blockade hemming in students around Mondawmin Mall, where looting erupted.

The problem is not black culture. It is policy and politics, the very things that bind together the history of Ferguson and Baltimore and, for that matter, the rest of America.

Specifically, the problem rests on the continued profitability of racism. Freddie Gray’s exposure to lead paint as a child, his suspected participation in the drug trade, and the relative confinement of black unrest to black communities during this week’s riot are all features of a city and a country that still segregate people along racial lines, to the financial enrichment of landlords, corner store merchants and other vendors selling second-rate goods.

The problem originates in a political culture that has long bound black bodies to questions of property. Yes, I’m referring to slavery.

Slavery was not so much a labor system as it was a property regime, with slaves serving not just as workers, but as commodities. Back in the day, people routinely borrowed against other human beings. They took out mortgages on them. As a commodity, the slave had a value that the state was bound to protect.

Now housing and commercial real estate have come to occupy the heart of America’s property regime, replacing slavery. And damage to real estate, far more than damage to ostensibly free black people, tends to evoke swift responses from the state. What we do not prosecute nearly well enough, however, is the daily assault on black people’s lives through the slow, willful destruction of real estate within black communities. The conditions in West Baltimore today are the direct consequence of speculative real estate practices that have long targeted people with few to no options.

On the heels of any ghetto economy based on extraction comes the excessive policing necessary to keep everyone in place. Cities that are starved for income have found ways to raise revenues by way of fines and fees exacted from poor, underemployed African-Americans and migrants of color. These include property taxes and court costs. In Maryland, in particular, these come in lieu of property taxes that many of the state’s largest employers are not required to pay. The dangers of tax burdens and other unseen costs are as deadly to urban households as police brutality or fires set by “thugs.”

In “The Wire,” Lester Freamon understood that following the money took our eyes off the street and up the chain of real political power. We have a right to expect that our administrators will use the bully pulpit to speak about the policies, systems and structures over which they preside.

By avoiding the language of individual failings and degenerate culture, political leaders, black and otherwise, can help us all see the daily violence of poverty. More, they can better use the power they have to do something about it. By calling a nationwide “state of emergency” on the problem of residential segregation, by devising a fairer tax structure, by investing in public space, community policing, tenants’ rights and a government jobs program, our leaders can find a way forward.